Letters That Spark Action

We’re entering an entirely new era for marketers. Let’s call this the year for building relationships. Right now, prospects want to make every purchase a safe one. That means they’ll rely on companies or brands they know and trust. Closing sales will require a stronger emphasis on tactics that let you relate to customers one to one. And it’s never been more important to craft a set of effective letters that you can customise for individual prospects.

Writing a great letter takes a bit of time and know-how. Whether you use it to follow up a lead, close a hot prospect or introduce your products and services, a well-crafted letter will be one of your most powerful and cost effective marketing tools at this time.

These six rules will help you write letters that motivate your best prospects:

Rule 1. Set a Measurable Goal

Every good letter must be written to make something happen. Focus on that goal before you begin and decide what your letter must contain to produce the desired result. Make reading your letter worthwhile for your prospect, and it will reward you by advancing the sales process. If you’re sending letters just to provide prospects with more information, you’re wasting your postage and opportunity to move prospects to the next level.

Rule 2. Have a Strong Hook

Your letter has to immediately grab the reader’s interest or it’ll be discarded as junk mail. Depending on the type of business you’re in and what you’re marketing, your hook can be a special offer or a lead communicating a unique benefit. When your letter follows a phone call, highlight the benefits your prospect desires in the first paragraph.

Rule 3. Convey a Unique Message

Have you ever received letters from competing companies with virtually identical offers? Chances are you tossed them because you couldn’t tell one company from the other. Take a look at one of your old letters. If it could have been sent by any of your closest competitors, rethink your approach. The message, pricing and offers contained in your letter must be unique to your business and tie into your branding.

Rule 4. Keep the Reader in Mind

Imagine you were face to face with your prospect, reading your letter aloud. Would you be comfortable, or would the tone be all wrong? Your letter is a one-to-one communication with a real person. Don’t come on too strong or over promise. Use simple, direct language, not flowery prose or impressive vocabulary. The look of your letter must convey your professionalism, so double-check for errors.

Rule 5. Write About “You the Customer”

Great letters are directed outward. That means they stress what “you the customer” will get and not what “we the company” provide.Highlight benefits at the outset, and use the body of your letter to describe the features. Then summarise the key benefit once again, and close with a call to action that gives the prospect a reason to move to the next step in your sales process.

Rule 6. Make Responding Easy

No matter the type of marketing letter you’re writing, close by providing a clear,actionable next step. In some cases, the responsibility for that action – such as sending a written proposal – will rest with you. When a special offer has been made, your letter should make it quick and easy for the prospect to take advantage of it via phone or email. The fewer hurdles your prospect must jump,the more likely you are to close the sale.

Kim T. Gordon is one of the country's leading experts on the small-business market. Over the past 30 years as an author, marketing expert, media spokesperson, speaker and coach, her work has helped millions of small-business owners increase their success.

Actually, Cold Emailing Can Work for Small Businesses

Cold emailing has existed since the dawn of the internet. The notion of finding business prospects through email has been around for this long because it works. Huge, multimillion-dollar companies owe their success to cold emailing, at least in their beginning phases. It doesn’t matter how big your business is, though, cold emailing is a method proven to increase sales leads and grow your network.

The idea of sending an email to another business can be daunting, especially for small ventures. It can be nerve-racking not knowing if that other business will consider your experience and solutions or just delete your email without a second thought. But, in reality, the only way you can get comfortable with cold emailing is to actually do it. You’ll learn quickly that you won’t care much about the responses you don’t get and more about the ones you do.

Plan it right

You’ve probably noticed your email inbox puts the newest messages at the top, making them the first ones a person sees. Plan to send your emails between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. More likely than not, your potential business leads are just arriving to work from a peaceful weekend and have a little more time on their hands to read through a few emails.

Be specific in your subject line

Make sure your subject line is short and specific. Don’t promise things you don’t intend to deliver on. If you’re asking for a minute of their time, make sure all you need is a minute. Within the email, don’t ramble on about a bunch of nonsense. Get to the point, and tell them why you’re emailing.

“When you want to grab the attention of someone important, scrap the entertaining subject lines and focus on utility,” says Adam Grant, Linkedin influencer, in his article 6 Ways to Get Me to Email You Back. In the age of clickbait, when people are busy, they want to know if clicking on your email will be worth it.

Don’t drag it out

Caroline Webb, author of How to Have a Good Day, gave readers her secret to successful cold emailing. She describes the Solution + Problem or Pain + Future + Solutionlayout. With this method, you tell the person you’re writing to what your solution is for a pain point or problem they might be having within their business. Then you show them what the future could look like with your solution. Remember, it’s all about how you can help them with their business, not how their business will help your own.

Make it personal

The most important thing you can do when it comes to cold emailing is to make the email personal. This is much easier to do when you’re a small business reaching out to other businesses in your own community. Tell them, specifically, why you want to do business with them. Let them know about other projects in town that you’ve been a part of, and if you’ve met them in the past, remind them – don’t assume they remember you.

Try to say the word “you” instead of the word “I” as often as you can. If you make the email too much about you, you’ll drown out the fact that you’re offering a solution to their potential problem.

Always end with a call-to-action, or CTA

Make sure each email ends with a request or a CTA, so that you can ensure you’re building connections with your audience. If you don’t tell people their next steps or what you want them to do, they won’t know you are actually waiting on their response. An effective CTA is exciting, not generic and includes a question or link for them to click, such as asking their opinion and including a link to another blog post.

Don’t be afraid to follow up with another approach if you find that your email has gone unanswered – and unopened.

One final piece of advice. Don’t just put a link in your email asking them to click. If they have no idea who you are, they most likely won’t do it. Make sure you say what you need to say within the email without requiring your potential clients and customers to go through a scavenger hunt of clicks to get there. Even though it’s called cold emailing, by using the right planning and the above tips, you can build those warm, lasting connections with your current and potential audience and set your small business up for future success.

How To Get The Most Value For Your Direct Marketing Money

It is a common, global problem in the digital age – how do you convert vast amounts of data into demonstrable business value? Marketers aren’t exempt from this conundrum, and the pressure is always on to justify the worth of running a marketing campaign in real world, practical terms.

So how can you glean the most profitability from a campaign? Start by addressing a core challenge: Separating the important data from the not so important.

More particularly, focus on demographic information that is easily accessible like age, gender, location. Then follow up by looking a bit deeper and adding data such as marital status and income. Grant Fleming, CEO of Leadify offers this advice to entrepreneurs and marketers.

1. System essentials

Beyond this, while choosing the right data is key, it’s wise to use the best direct marketing system possible for your marketing needs. For starters, it should report on the data that is most important. It should also offer smart dashboards that displays comprehensive information. And it should accommodate users who want to put analytics and insights together manually.

Having all three in place – pulling together data, running analytics and translating those into presentable reports – is not just a nice to have. It’s increasingly essential, as direct marketing is fast becoming a saturated space. Figuring out ways to better personalise data, and target and curate the right audience for the right message at the right time has become mission critical.

2. Aid from the machines

The good news is that machine learning is set to take much of the onerous work out of personalising data. But the caveat is that its usage doesn’t exempt you from being involved, as machines still need to be taught what constitutes good data to begin with. You thus need to know and understand how to curate data properly from the outset.

For the foreseeable future, you still need to understand what you are feeding the machine learning algorithms with, and most importantly, testing assumptions. Avoid the tendency to assume that because the results came from a machine, they are correct. Rather, conclusions drawn need to be continually tested, verified and honed where appropriate.

3. Pitfalls and challenges

But, while you may have a basis from which to extract more value from your data, what is preventing you? Among key obstacles that many marketing companies do not realise, is the power of the tools that are available to them, especially those locally produced.

This is to their detriment, as the tools readily available in South Africa boast sophisticated, yet simple, insight dashboards and reporting metrics that could power-up their marketing efforts.

As for a potential opportunity, this too is a topic that is often mentioned in other industries, that of creating greater integration with a variety of tools. In reality, few companies have managed to integrate their digital, social and direct marketing approaches well.

Getting more money out of your data boils down to sorting the wheat from the chaff, having the right system in place, curating data, and finally, using machine learning with an eye towards it being an aid, rather than a replacement for human efforts.

For businesses across the board, one way to get better returns is by improving efficiencies. For marketers in particular, the million rand question is how to build better databases and grow their audience.

Grant Fleming, CEO of Leadify, says that building up an audience around particular marketing messages or strategies rather than pushing out any and all content to anyone, is essential. The latter may have been a trend that TV advertising praised, but it is ineffective as well as wasteful, when applied to direct marketing campaigns.

Marketers also must pay attention to their ‘list hygiene’ i.e. ensure irrelevant messages aren’t being sent to the wrong demographic. Do this by avoiding over-marketing, a factor which may be missed by those operating with a ‘more is better’ mindset. This can derail efforts, as even if people are partially interested in the marketing message, they will reach an unsubscribe point more quickly if marketers press them too often.

Dealing with information deluge

Front of mind for marketers should be that people are being besieged by information more than ever. Additionally, email and SMS channels are especially hotly contested marketing spaces, full of marketing promotions.

Clearly, any marketers who want to increase their opt-ins need to get their message and audience right from the outset, while ensuring that they send carefully crafted campaigns at the right time.

Segmentation needs to become more sophisticated too and is among top marketing trends for 2018. Doing so helps marketers treat their audience differently and adds a level of personalisation to their campaigns.

The Smart Insights report even suggests greater personalisation will result in an increase in conversions, by keeping marketers relevant and in touch with lists’ changing needs and preferences.

Strategies for success

Analytics can play a significant role here.

More granular detail can be built up over time such as what day of the week, and time of the day messages should be sent to particular segmented audiences for the optimal response.

Spread marketing messages out for a while too, and then hone in on specific days of the week, and times of the day, according to the audience being targeted. It’s considerably more effective to target the right audience at the right time than continuously sending general messages all day.

The importance of A/B testing to help hone the message to your audience also cannot be underestimated. By testing two or more variants, and listening to the feedback received, marketers have a basis from which to optimise their campaigns.

Further benefits

As for databases, is bigger still better? Yes, but only as a starting point for the data to be further segmented and refined, empowering marketers to more accurately define their audiences.

All this may sound like a great deal of work, but the benefit of doing so isn’t just to build an audience. It will also help marketers deal with the increased pressure from the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) act to ensure they aren’t spamming their audience.